Divorce and Legal Separation Have Some Differences
Video Transcribed: Should I divorce my spouse or just legally separate from him? Hi, I’m Ty Smith, an attorney in Oklahoma City with Wirth Law Office. And a question we get a lot in client interviews, at least initial client interviews, should I divorce my spouse or just legally separate from him?
The difference is small but important because, from a bird’s eye perspective, the big difference between a divorce and legal separation is really whether you can marry someone else. Once you’re divorced, clearly you can go marry someone else. Legal separation carries all of the legal division of property and obligations with children that divorce has, but you can’t get married again. And unless you want to live a life as a lonely bachelor or bachelorette, essentially, that’s not normally very appealing to people. And so when I advise people whether they should divorce their spouse versus legally separate them, typically legal separation is just kind of a precursor to divorce.
Most of the time folks will do legal separation when they choose to do it because they have a lot of assets and they’re trying to see what it’s going to look like when everything’s all divided up and what’s life going to look like. Can we be divorced? And it’s a bit way of kind of sticking your toe in the water, but they, most of the time, get divorced afterward.
So if you’ve gotten to this point in your relationship where you are worried, you’re thinking you may not want to be with this person anymore, and you’re not sure if legal separation is the path or divorce is the path, come to talk to us at Wirth Law Office to get in touch with an Oklahoma divorce lawyer and we’ll hopefully give you a more accurate answer because this is a very fact-intensive question. But I’m going to tell you, most of the time, divorce is probably the better option if this is what you’re thinking about.
